Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Josh Lanyon

Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Josh Lanyon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Classic Lanyon dynamic -- [insert artistic inclination here] narrator with [insert tragical condition/past here] gets tangled up in a [insert type of crime investigation] while his hard-nosed cop boyfriend glowers a lot. Here that would be poet, drug addiction, and murder, respectively.

Totally serviceable, in that way they are when the formula works for you.




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Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett

Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Fun and Pratchetty, but also disappointing. The Witch books have done a lot of work with female power -- hello, witches -- and its various . . . channels, I guess you could say. Power of magic, and headology, and matriarchy, and being promiscuous (Nanny) and not being promiscuous (Granny). And I was hoping this book would bring that out more, particularly as a main plot thread is about a young witch's marriage and assumption of a different, overtly political power. About a quarter of the way through, I was getting all excited, thinking this was going to be about marriage, and what it does to women's power of all kinds, and learning to inhabit the role you've got, or writing a new one, or--

And then it just . . . wasn't. Really any of that. And that made me sad.




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